Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Launch Event Report

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Sigil and Sony celebrate going live with a tribute to the persistent state world's late Art Director, Keith Parkinson

By Richard Aihoshi - 'Jonric'

In late October of 2005, four days after turning 47, Keith Parkinson lost a 16-month battle against leukemia, and the game development community lost one of its great artistic talents. Born in California, he found his calling at a young age; while still in high school, he began to paint landscapes populated by terrifying fantasy creatures. During a five-year stint at TSR during the 1980s, he created book and magazine covers, calendars, game boxes, modules et al for titles such as Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. After that, he spent several years as a cover artist for works by noted authors like Terry Goodkind, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, and Terry Brooks. From 2000 on, he focused his attention on gaming, producing an inspiring body of work, the majority of which was for EverQuest and its first several expansions.

April of 2002 saw Parkinson undertake what would be his final major project; he joined Sigil Games Online to help create Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As Art Director, it was his job to craft a distinctive look for the gameworld of Telon and all the elements within. This was a huge endeavor; when the title went live recently, it had three large continents, each with its own locations and environments, almost 20 playable races, hundreds of monster types, etc. I had occasion to speak with Keith a couple of times during development, and based on those conversations, it seems certain he would have been pleased with what his art team produced. So, it seemed appropriate that the recent event celebrating the game's launch was built around a display of his work, which will soon go on tour to various cities.

As for Vanguard, which was live on a handful of stations, it is, as you might expect an art-rich game. This means it has a pretty sizeable footprint; you should have at least 20 GB of free space on your hard drive before installing. The system requirements are also on the high side, including at least a 2.4 GHz processor (3 GHz recommended) with 512 MB of RAM (2 GB) and a pixel and vertex shader 2.0 compatible video card with 128 MB of texture memory (256 MB). It seems likely that most computer gamers' rigs will at least meet the minimum specifications, but if you have a machine that's more than about two years old, it may not fit all the recommended ones.

Wood Elf

Dark Elf

In terms of the play, the team leaders have stated all along that its goal was to provide an in-depth experience. This has, at times, been misinterpreted to mean it would incorporate elements like a lot of grinding and substantial death penalties. When I spoke with Co-Executive Producer Jeff Butler about this image, he did express a desire to address it so prospective players can make their decisions based on more complete and accurate information. During the same conversation, he did say he was satisfied with how well Vanguard turned out relative to the initial vision for it. Further to that, he volunteered that some elements not implemented at launch will be going in before too long. As a couple of examples, he cited guild buildings and flying mounted combat. In the latter case, he briefly described being aboard a mighty griffon clawing at the enemy.

Flying mounts

Ship

Another topic I brought up was game elements that Butler would like to be better known and understood. His reply, not all that surprisingly, was diplomacy, which is one of Vanguard's three "spheres of advancement", the other two being adventuring and crafting. The system for this aspect went in quite late; it was apparently finalized only last fall. This meant there was little time to build awareness of it or to explain its workings. In the latter respect, my knowledge of it is currently insufficient to attempt a description - which clearly supports Butler's answer.

Rift

Group

Now that the game has entered live service, it's to be hoped that Sigil will have more time to devote to disseminating information about it. Vanguard has a goodly number of attractive features, a few of which are a sprawling, seamless world, a plethora of race / class combinations you can play - almost 150 in all - and an interesting combat system with various types of special moves, chained attacks, finishing maneuvers et al. It would be a shame if significant numbers of potential players were to decide not even to try playing based on inadequate knowledge of such elements, or even worse, on misconceptions. Rather than that, we look forward to the team giving us every possible reason to visit Telon, the virtual world that is Keith Parkinson's final legacy.

/>For coverage of Sigil's title from a more community-oriented perspective, we invite you to visit our Vanguard Vault on a regular basis. - Ed.